Softly on Night Air
by Aphreal42
Summary: A mysterious visitor arrives at the X-mansion late one night in search of a certain Southern Belle
1. Section 1 -- The Arrival

Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction, intended only for the amusement of the author, some of her friends, and hopefully whoever is reading this. Rogue and Gambit belong to Marvel and are being borrowed without permission. As a side note, I'm not sure what happened to their accents except that I simply didn't write them in this story; no better explanation than that, sorry. No money is being made from this story, unfortunately, and suing a college student is about like bleeding a turnip. 

Author's Note: This is for my friend and former roomie Heather. She saw the Rogue vampire picture on my bulletin board (from the Haunted Mansion card set) and, being an avid vampire fan, asked how Rogue became a vampire. Well, Heath, here's my answer; hope you like it! 

It was a calm night in late summer, and the air held the slightest chill, a murmured promise of the cold weather to come. The night was preternaturally still, and the soft evening sounds were swallowed up in its black silence. The night was clear, every star glistening like an exquisite diamond, but the full moon glowed eerily, surrounded by a hazy nimbus. Staring up at it, Rogue shivered, thinking she felt a soft breeze stirring the hairs on the back of her neck. She walked aimlessly across the mansion grounds, wandering restlessly, unsettled by some vague uneasiness she couldn't explain. 

She felt a hand on her arm, simply appearing there with no warning or indication, not a single rustle of clothing or whisper of footstep in the grass to betray its owner's approach. The hand was cool and smooth, its skin perfectly flawless against her arm bared by the summery shift she wore. For a long second, she merely felt it, unconsciously analyzing the sensations. Then her conscious thought took in what she was feeling and she spun quickly around, a question dying on her lips as she saw him. 

He was as perfect as the soft, flawless hand he had touched her with. He was dressed in dark clothes that further accented his unblemished pale skin. His hair was deep brown, long and drawn back softly into a neat ponytail. But what captivated her and caught the words from her throat were his eyes. They were of darkest brown, almost black, intense pools a person could be willingly immersed in never to surface again. He blinked, and with an effort she pulled her gaze away from them, escaping that enthralling trap to which she would have eagerly succumbed. Slowly, like someone halfway awakened from sleepwalking, her eyes traveled to his immaculate hand, still slightly extended towards her. With her gaze fixed on that pale smooth skin, she remembered her question and tried to rouse voice from her frozen throat. "How...?" 

"...did I touch you?" he finished for her, his voice as rich and entrancing as the rest of him. It was softly understated with an almost musical depth adding compelling intensity. "You cannot steal the life-force of one who does not live." 

She was so caught in the sound of his voice that she barely heard the individual words, and her mind had to slowly process the syllables into meaning. As their message came clear to her, her eyes widened and she stared at him again, more critically and intently this time, seeking answers instead of simply drinking and drowning in his inhuman beauty. Perfect, he was the embodiment of beauty beyond human possibility. He was flawless, untouched by human shortcomings. As her eyes lingered in awe on every line of his face, he nodded as if reading and confirming the still-unformed thoughts that stirred dreamily through her unfocused mind. 

"Yes, I am as you think," he said softly, the sensual but firm lips parting to reveal even white teeth with canines lengthened almost imperceptibly to form points below the neat row of the incisors. "I have come for you," he told her, hands extended and arms open ever so slightly. Every movement and gesture was understated, executed with the most perfect grace and economical simplicity yet conveying his meaning with unerring completeness. Compelled, unable and wholly unwilling to resist, Rogue moved into his proffered embrace. He did not let her press against his body as a part of her longed to do, holding her instead carefully and gently away so her face remained inches from his own, her gaze unable to rest anywhere but his deep hypnotic eyes. "I have watched and wanted you for a long time," he whispered to her. 

"Why me?" she asked, finding her voice at last, weak and trembling though it might be. 

"You are beautiful," he responded, one hand releasing her arm to caress the line of her cheek softly. Her eyes closed in pleasure at the simple touch, intoxicating because it was skin and beyond that, perfect inhuman skin. 

"So is every other woman in this mansion," she countered an eternity later, after his hand had returned to her arm and her mind was able to formulate the words. 

"You are different; you are one of us already," he whispered compellingly. "You do what we can only long for, stealing away not lifeblood but life essence instead. You are what we are and a level transcendent we cannot reach; no frame should limit you." He stared into her eyes deeply before adding the final touch, "You should be immortal." 

Drowning as she was in his eyes, his words, his exotic undefinable scent, his very presence, there was no choice she could make. As the pressure of his hands holding her away lessened, she melted willingly against his frame. She leaned against him, head pillowed on his shoulder, body pressed against his. Her head tilted back, and the hair fell from her neck, exposing it to him. The feelings that coursed through her as he embraced her and his lips neared and touched her throat were not sensual. It was a wave of complete adoration; he overwhelmed her, mind and senses. His power awed her. The attraction could not be sexual; he was too removed from her plane of existence, too far from human for her to even imagine directing such feelings towards him. He was simply perfect; it was the only word she could find. She felt the bite, sensed acutely the teeth smoothly penetrating her skin, but her neurons were so overloaded by his nearness that they didn't register it as pain. How could something coming from him, this god that reduced her to helpless eager subservience, cause her harm? After that instant of penetration, her senses were too overwhelmed to register anything. Her mind swooned into an awed state of ecstatic delirium, and she knew no more. 


	2. Section 2 -- The Parting

Author's Note: While the story overall was inspired by and written for Heather, this part is Kori's fault. She's the one who insisted I couldn't just leave well enough alone and not introduce Gambit. For once, I intended to write something without him in it, but, alas, it was not to be. 

The day had been warm, appropriately so for the beautiful summer whose close was drawing near. Gambit shifted in his sleep, a sudden chill dragging his consciousness nearer the surface and away from the depths of his wandering dreams. His hands clutched groggily at the covers, seeking a blanket to ward off the cold, but before he found one it had passed. Still, something kept him from sinking back into sleep, a feeling that things weren't as they should be. Slowly, he opened his eyes and saw her. He studied her a moment before letting her know he was awake. She was wonderfully familiar and yet somehow changed as well. Her form was still her own, slender and draped in that sweet little sundress, as she leaned casually against his windowframe. Her hair hadn't changed, beautiful chestnut waves that cascaded around her bare shoulders, the striking white streak, glistening in the moonlight that poured across her. Her skin was beautifully pale in that same light, making her appear delicate, transient, insubstantial. His eyes brushed over all of this before being held on her face. It held her features but was at the same time infinitely more beautiful than she had ever been. Her expression was one of sad longing as she stared at him. Her deep green eyes moved slowly over his thinly-concealed form beneath the sheets, drinking him in with her gaze. The intensity of emotion in those eyes froze his breath and strained his heart near to breaking with love for her. They held sorrow, regret, and painfully firm resolve beyond human limits. As he watched, she turned slowly to leave, soft locks of hair shading her face from his view and breaking the trance that held him spellbound. 

"Chere, wait," he spoke hoarsely, stirring dazedly to raise himself from the pillows. 

With hypnotic liquidity, she turned back to face him. Those amazing green eyes fixed him again in their gaze, and one pale hand started to stretch towards him in a small but poignant gesture of indescribable need. "Remy," she spoke softly, her voice familiar but changed. He could still hear the warmth, the soft southern drawl, but there was a new resonance, powerful undertones that pulsed with power and emotion beyond his comprehension. "I just came to say goodbye, to see you one last time." 

This strange announcement, worlds removed from anything he would have expected to come from her lips, so confused him that he didn't even consciously register the strangeness concealed behind those sensual rosy lips. "You're leaving?" he stammered, staring at her in shock, hoping he misunderstood, his heart wordlessly begging that this vision creature wouldn't be taken from him. Her slight nod shattered those desires. "Why?" was all he could manage. 

"I'm not like you anymore," she explained in a resonant voice that quavered with uncontainable emotion. Somehow the remark didn't seem directed at him specifically but intended to encompass all of his kind, as if she were removed from him by differences he could never comprehend. "I can stay here no longer." 

"What happened? Where will you go? How can I find you?" the questions poured from him, the flood asking only a fraction of what he needed to know. 

"I'm sorry, Remy, you can't," she replied softly, answering only the last of his queries, her voice heavy with pain. Her deep green eyes stared longingly at him as she turned to leave. "I do love you," she whispered almost imperceptibly as she slipped out the window and out of his life. 


	3. Section 3 -- The Confrontation

Author's Note: Once again, Kori wasn't happy with where I was leaving things, so I had to write another part. It was her birthday, after all. I was gonna quit, so if you don't like it, you know who to blame...

All the pleasure had gone from the warm, lazy summer afternoon. Gambit's mind was whirling, too deeply buried in its inner musings for him to notice the golden sun, the sharp blue sky, or the caressing warmth that bathed over him. He had thought, had desperately hoped, that his strange visit from Rogue the night before had been nothing more than the sleepy wanderings of an over-tired mind. He had firmly convinced himself of that by the time he climbed wearily from sheets tangled by his restless night. His content denial was crushed when he discovered she wasn't in the mansion and no one knew where she had gone. It had suddenly become real then. He had to accept that she had come to him, said her ambiguous farewells, and drifted away without a word of explanation. Something about the situation kept nagging at him as the hours passed, forcing him to turn his contemplations from the languid day around him to instead chase tantalizing thoughts in maddeningly futile circles through the convoluted landscape of his mind. 

The day wore on, and the sun continued in its blazing arc across a sky that faded from brilliant blue to fiery reds, a dusty lavender, and finally arrived at a deep velvety black. Still, Gambit's mind wrestled with itself. He was sure he was missing some vital detail of the previous night's encounter but couldn't imagine what it might be. He was unable to think back through the meeting with a detached, critical eye. His thoughts kept lingering on sentimental trivialities, the sadness in her eyes, her sweet perfume, the soft curve of her breasts, the way her hair caressed her neck and shoulders as he longed to, those final words he was certain she had said. He became caught up in elaborate daydreams and fancies, unable to force his mind into logical pathways. He tried again, remembering how she had looked when she had turned back to him and realized he was awake. His mind recalled in breath-stopping clarity the fall of her hair across her neck, the painful longing in her exquisite green eyes, her hand moving unbidden to reach for him, her rosy lips parting to speak and revealing something just the slightest bit wrong. He hadn't dwelt on it at the time, too captivated by her to notice, but now his mind seemed certain. The moonlight had been dim, her face had been shadowed into mystery, and she had barely even opened her mouth, so there was no way he should have seen and remembered her teeth distinctly. And yet he couldn't convince himself they had appeared normal. It was nothing drastic, a slight variation at most, barely enough to catch even in the subconscious memory of a trained thief. He focused his mental eye tightly, filtering out all the other perceptions, trying to picture her mouth exactly as he had seen it. No matter how he tried to convince himself that it sounded crazy, he firmly recalled seeing tiny delicate fangs in her mouth. 

If he was right, and every instinct screamed that he was, he knew what he had to do. She obviously didn't mean to come back to him; that was the only thing made painfully clear by her visit. So he would have to go to her, and he knew just the place to start looking. 

For a summer night, the air was especially chilled under the overhanging boughs that closed him in. The anxiously rustling leaves whispered with the hint of breeze that tried to stir the heavy air. Looking up, he faintly saw individual stars dimly twinkling in the shifting gaps between the foliage. He stopped walking, sensing a subtle change in his surroundings. The murmur of the leaves had stopped, and the air hung perfectly still around him, swallowing the sound of his very breath in its silence. Everything was frozen, waiting, but for what he couldn't tell. Not knowing how, he felt her. She was there, and the world was stilled in deference to her presence. Unable to stand the pregnant silence any longer, he shouted into the empty air. "Come out where I can see you! Don't leave me like this!" The anticipation continued, thickened even more by the words that were absorbed the instant they left him. Desperately, he cried out again. "Chere, don't do this. If you can't come back, at least come to me now. Please, Rogue, I need answers." His voice was strained by confusion and heart-break, and it must have touched something in her. There was no motion, no noise, but the atmosphere changed. The weight in the air lifted around him. 

Slowly, as if coalescing and allowing him to see her where she had already been, her form took shape from among the trees in front of him. She was just as agonizingly beautiful as the last time he'd seen her, all human imperfections smoothed away by the force that immortalized her. Now that he suspected what she was, it was apparent in a hundred tiny details: the grace with which she moved, fluid and effortless; the pale luminescence of her flawless skin; the power, intensity, and depth beyond his comprehension that he read in her eyes. She was beyond human and more indescribably beautiful than she had ever been before. "You've changed, chere," he began, refusing to let her overwhelm him, drawing on the strength of his forlorn confusion to support his will. "How did it happen?" 

"I can't tell you," she replied in that same vibrant voice that was hers and yet not. "Some things are forbidden mortals." 

"Why'd you do it?" he tried next. 

Her eyes lit up with a glow that was a strange mixture of awe and fear. "He came to me, offering everything I wanted but had never known to ask for. He was so perfect, so beyond human, beyond anything I had conceived of." Her head tilted back, chestnut hair shifting along the pale column of her neck, eyes closing as she savored the memories with a slight shiver of mingled delight and terror. "He overwhelmed me, and I couldn't imagine refusing him, couldn't consider even wanting to." Her eyes opened and slid back to latch their gaze on his own. "He was perfection embodied, and I was powerless to refuse." 

"I understand completely," he whispered back, breaths coming quickly, heart pounding as his eyes slid longingly over every line of her face and every curve of her body. "You do the same thing to me without even trying." He paused for a moment, reining his thoughts back under his control. "You're never coming back." 

It had been a painful statement, not really a question, but she answered anyway. "I can't. I'm not like you anymore." 

"No, you're not," he agreed, staring again into her captivatingly powerful, despairingly regretful green eyes. "But you could make me like you." 

A flicker of hopeful shock crossed her eyes before being replaced with a sadness deeper than anything he had seen there before. "You don't really want that," she told him softly, voice heavy with remorse. "It didn't matter for me; I was always a creature who spread death and misery. You're too full of life. You belong in life. To fix you into a single state and rob you of the mercurial spirit that makes you what you are would be a great disservice to the world. I could never take you." Her voice broke off, and her face became angry, her eyes filled with a bitter choler turned inwards. "You can't even think clearly. You said yourself I was overwhelming you; you don't even know what you want. You just think you want to be like this because I want you with me." She trailed off sadly into silence, her green eyes tight with yearning, her jaw set with determination. 

"You want it, and I'm asking you for it," he pressed her desperately. "Do it. Make me a vampire." It was the first time either of them had actually said the word, and it hung in the air like a curse. 

She shook her head firmly, a barely perceptible motion but enough for him to know she wouldn't change her mind. "I told you, you just think you want it because I'm here. Remy, someone with your love for life shouldn't court death. This is how it has to be." Not waiting for him to speak further, she faded back into the shadows, slipping away and leaving behind an emptiness so complete it was as if she'd never been there at all. 

The sounds of the night resumed around him as her intense presence dispersed, the rustling leaves covering his final determined whisper. "No, it doesn't." 


	4. Section 4 -- The Resolution

Author's Note: Thanks to Kori for breaking this fortunately short-lived writer's block, especially since it's her fault I'm still writing. Also, thanks for Heath for loaning me her Anne Rice books and apologies to Anne Rice for anything I may have stolen, borrowed, or misused. 

Rogue sat in disconsolate silence, absorbing the stillness of the night around her. The sky was perfectly clear, and the setting moon, two nights past full, hung low over the tops of the trees behind her. Its mysterious glow threw her shadow out before her and highlighted every detail of the carved marble angel before her. It was a beautiful statue, a slightly larger-than-life woman standing silhouetted on a simple cross. Her bird-like wings were spread halfway, forming a backdrop for her delicate form. Her hands were overlapped just above her waist, cradling a carefully carved dove. Her face was upturned, casting towards the dark heavens with an expression of ultimate peace and the contentment that comes from complete acceptance of one's fate. Her eyes were closed, whether in rapture or submission Rogue wasn't sure. A single red rose, fresh and glistening with the early morning dew, had been carefully placed across the gravestone at the angel's feet, testament to the devoted love borne by someone for the one buried there. Rogue wasn't sure if it was darkly morbid or terribly appropriate that she should feel drawn here, to a graveyard. Perhaps it was where she belonged, here among the dead. But it wasn't the morbid rows of tombstones that held her to commune with those past life. It was this particular plot, a poignant expression of lovers separated by the unbreakable barrier between those living and those who no longer are. She could relate all too well. 

She registered the sound of a footstep behind her, light and smooth, so faint a mortal wouldn't have detected it at all. Motion that carefully controlled could not be managed by a human, so it must be another immortal, the one who had come to her two nights ago. She would simply sit and wait for him to do whatever he intended; he had been alive for centuries and was beyond even her heightened immortal comprehension. He would act as he chose to, and her response should follow his lead. She felt him sit on the bench beside her. Her gaze didn't move from its contemplation of the angel statue. She waited with him in silence for a long moment, knowing he would speak when he was ready. 

After this pause, her companion did speak, hesitantly, with an air of forced nervousness. "Come here often?" 

She knew that voice, even altered as it was. Eyes wide, she whipped her head around to see an all too familiar face looking at her with a self-satisfied grin. For all that she was furious, she had to admit that the change suited him. He was gorgeous as an immortal. His skin was paled by the moonglow, not resembling a deathly pallor so much as enhancing the air of mystery that had always hung about him. His features, always slightly rough, were softened to the perfect blend of male strength and sensitivity. His untidy hair, mostly pulled back, managed to escape in a few places, drawing lines of reddish-brown against his pale cheeks, strands she ached to brush back just to feel his face under her hand. His eyes, demon eyes when alive, were even more entangling now. The black was startling against his paled skin, and the red centers blazed brightly while holding immeasurable depths that she longed to sink into and explore. He was gorgeous, he was incredible, and beyond all of that he was no longer alive. 

"How dare you?" she snapped angrily, fury raising in her to be directed at this too-perfect answer that was all wrong. "I told you not to do this. I wanted you to live. You can't listen, can you? You run off and go over my head, doing exactly what you want regardless. How dare you give up your life like this? I'm not worth that kind of sacrifice. You should have stayed alive and moved on. I told you you didn't know what you were asking for. I told you it was just me projecting desires onto you." 

"And I've been telling you for years that I can make my own decisions and I know what I want," he interrupted her smoothly, deeply blazing red eyes turning on her with complete conviction and sincerity. "What I want is to be with you." 

"It's not worth dying," she persisted, less sure of herself under the force of that loving gaze. 

"Without, it wasn't worth living." 

He was heart-stoppingly incredible, he was completely in earnest, and he was here just for the chance to be with her. Any further arguments she had flew completely out of her head as she traced the lines of his face with her eyes. "And you didn't even know," she whispered in soft amazement. 

"Know what, chere?" 

"That my powers don't affect our kind," she replied softly, waiting for him to realize the implications. "You did this just to be with me, not even knowing that we could really be together this way." Without another word or waiting for his response, she leaned over and kissed him. 

A soft wistful smile crossed his face as he watched them. They were his children, in a strange way, and he was greatly happy for them. He hadn't bothered to explain that his hopes about mutant blood had been wrong when the second one had surprisingly sought him out. The woman's essence had done nothing for him except provide a satisfying meal. The boy had been eagerly willing to give up his life to be with her, and he couldn't refuse them this chance. He had agreed, letting the boy think they were both benefiting. And perhaps it was more true than he had known; he did feel as if he had gained something by reuniting them. He watched them embrace, then slowly part and remain sitting next to each other, simply holding hands, both of their inhuman faces radiant with joy. He watched as the girl's free hand stole up to gently brush the boy's hair back from his eyes. They were so young, had so very much to learn. But they would have him to teach and guide them. His mind unusually contented, he watched as his fledglings stood and walked from the cemetery, beginning new lives together. 


End file.
